Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

So I joined the army, Jack. Now here I am in sunny Basra. Wish you were here. No, not really. Remember me to Ellie.

But he wasn’t here either. He was there. He was back there in Barton Field. There was the big oak, its leaves brushing a big blue sky. But there was no Dad, no Luke, no gun. And no Jack. But he was lying in Barton Field more or less where Luke had been shot and had known all along it was coming. It was summer, it was warm and the grass was full of buzzing insects. And then he could hear something else, getting closer. He hadn’t heard that sound for a long time now, but he knew straight away what it was, and if he could lift his head he might just be able to see them. It was the unmistakable, steady ‘tchch … tchch … tchch’ of browsing cattle, the slow, soft rip-rip of cows’ mouths tearing up grass. It was the most soothing sound in the world and it was utterly indifferent.

ELLIE SITS BY Holn Cliffs, looking at the vanished postcard view. The occasional white, whizzing missile of a wind-hurled seagull is almost the only sign that there’s anything out there.

Their seaside life, vanished too now, toppled over a cliff. Their Isle of Wight life. She’d come here once, all alone, to see for herself, when it was still her secret, her gift in store, like some unborn child. Twenty-seven years old. Fine spring weather. The view had been glorious then. Her dad was in a hospital bed, knowing no more about this excursion of hers than he’d known about that spin she’d taken when she was sixteen. And thank God it wasn’t the same Land Rover. She’d taken the ferry to Fishbourne, gone up on the sun deck, as if she were on a pleasure cruise.

Their Isle of Wight life. The beauty of it: a whole separate land, with only a short sea to cross, but happily cut off from the land of their past. Not exactly their ‘isle of joy’. It wasn’t Tahiti. Look at it now. Or St Lucia (that would come later). But nonetheless it was a fact, and it had become their purpose, that they were in the business of pleasure. And it had become theirs , not just ‘The Lookout’, but ‘Ellie’s and Jack’s’. Once it had been Alice’s and Tony’s — Allie-and-Tony’s. Now it was Ellie-and-Jack’s.

She’d stood beside him, in a straw-coloured dress, in that registry office in Newport and not minded at all that she was changing her name. It seemed a good name. Luckston. Later, outside their front door — it was a mild October afternoon and the caravans below even looked like something spread out for a wedding — she’d said, ‘Well, come on, you won’t get another chance.’ And he’d done it as if he’d been planning it all along. My God, he’d scooped her up as if she’d been as light as straw herself.

He’d come out of his mourning for Jebb, and not so slowly, and actually started to look happy. Farmer Jack. She’d even thought she might settle for there not being any other kind of birth, for the sake of this remarkable rebirth in him. And hadn’t she caused it to happen? And, anyway, was it so out of the question that there still might be both kinds of birth?

So was it any wonder that she’d been both flattened and glad — glad — when that letter came?

‘Leave me out of this, Jack.’

She should have gone with him, back into the wretched past. For a moment she sees before her not the November rain of the Isle of Wight but the soft flaps and veils of midsummer rain over the Devon hills as she drove into Barnstaple the morning after her father had died. She’d called Jack from a pay-phone in the hospital to give him the news without any tearfulness and with hardly a tremble in her voice. She’d wanted to convey to him that she was being practical and steady — and he was still in the grip of his own father’s death. It was over, it had been expected (and, yes, all those years, since she was sixteen, were over too). In a little while they might start to think of their own lives.

‘No, it’s okay, I don’t need you with me.’

And he’d done two lots of milking.

And he’d needed her with him two days ago.

She should have gone too, been at his side, even wept a little. She was weeping now. But she just couldn’t do it. Stand on some grim piece of tarmac, while it all came back, in a flag-wrapped parcel, by way of Iraq, their old, left-behind life. Then stand, again, in that churchyard. By Tom’s grave. By her father’s.

She just couldn’t do it — any more, apparently, than she could go and stand by her mother’s. She just couldn’t do it, even if Jack had to. She could see there was no way round it for him.

She’d listened to him leave, two mornings ago. It seems already like two weeks. Heard him moving downstairs in the kitchen, heard the front door, his feet on the road outside. The car starting. She’d actually thought: Poor man, poor man, to have to be going on such a journey. None of his noises had sounded angry, there was no slamming. It was almost as if he’d been trying not to wake her.

How could she have let him do it without even seeing him off, without standing in the doorway, without so much as a kiss or a hug or even an ‘I’ll be thinking of you’? My poor Jack, my poor one-and-only Luxton left. But how could she have said or done any of those things when, in the first place, she might simply have gone with him?

It was still dark. She hadn’t moved. She’d even pulled the duvet tighter up round her. There was a brief brightness at the curtains as he put on his headlights before slipping down the hill. Even as he’d left she’d wondered: would he come back? Was this the sort of journey and the sort of starting out on it from which he might never come back?

The fear had taken hold of her that he might not come back. How absurd. When she might have gone with him. She’d left all those messages on his mobile, none of which had been answered. Well, she’d asked for it. I’m thinking of you. I love you. Forgive me.

Strangely, in all the time he was gone, she’d hardly thought of Tom, returning, in his own way — being returned — to where he’d come from. Or put herself in the terrible position of some mother or wife receiving back, but not receiving back, a soldier-husband, a soldier-son. She’d thought of her own mother, of going to be with her, and failed to do even that. Failed twice now. All she’d wanted was for Jack to come back.

Well, he had come back. And he hadn’t. And now it seemed she might sit here in this lay-by for ever.

JACK SWUNG THE Cherokee back onto the road and sped off as if from some delay not of his own making. He’d wasted valuable time getting choked up. Part of him recognised that it was the whole point of this journey, to get choked up. It was its essence. But some other part of him was now trying to outdrive this immobilising stuff inside him. He looked in the mirror, half expecting to see the black hearse on his tail.

The road was clear, in both directions. The November day was brightening again, the grey clouds breaking, so that a whole hillside would suddenly light up while everything else seemed to darken.

He crossed the infant River Thames, back into Wiltshire, but the countryside, the passing signs to innocent-sounding villages, now vaguely oppressed him, unlike when he’d left the motorway to drive north in the morning. He was relieved when he joined the M4 and was sucked into its tunnelled anonymity. He saw himself as a mere moving speck on a map — the blue line of the M4 draped like a cable across the land. The road was everything and, despite the names that loomed at junctions, might have been anywhere. Chippenham? Malmes-bury? Where the hell were they?

But for the first time he became conscious of the empty seat beside him, of the pointedness of its emptiness. What was Ellie doing now? The Isle of Wight seemed already far away, as far away, almost, as Iraq. He couldn’t imagine what Ellie was doing now. He couldn’t imagine that she was sitting now at the Lookout, trying to imagine what he was doing. Wishing that, after all, she was sitting next to him.